Few days ago, I’ve watched a presentation on TED Talks about the computer’s user interface held by Anand Agarawala. It’s extremely interesting, so sacrifice 5 minutes of your lives and watch this video. It’s worth every second!

Impressive, isn’t it? But the question that pops in my mind is would I really like that kind of User Interface? I think not. Especially now, after I’ve gotten used to the point-and-click one. It’s like walking and driving a car, it’s natural and intuitively to walk but once I’ve learned to drive and interact with the car via its wheel, pedals and gear stick interface, any attempt to drive a car that was supposed to be handled with a revolutionary interface that would make driving similar to walking would quickly turn me in an even greater menace that I already am.

The interface is funny to use, but after a some time it gets boring. It could be more intuitive and help old people use the computer, but by the time this interface will be widely used, we will be the “old people”. I think it’s a very interesting experiment, just like dontclick.it was 5 years ago, but I doubt that will ever hit the market.

I’m waiting for the vocal computer interface, just like they had in Star Trek.

I’ve tried BumpTop and I have to say I liked it … for the first 5 minutes. Then I’ve realized that nothing that seemed natural to me was really working in it. Do I ever take a stack of things and browse them by taking each one and moving them from one hand to the other? Do I want my desktop to actually become smaller in order to accomodate the “walls” where I can place the same things I would on a normal desktop? What do I do with icons of different sizes? Do I want fancy picture slideshows on the desktop? And more than anything else: do I even USE the desktop? I mean, really… the desktop is all 3Dish and then I open notepad right over it.
Bottom line: I’ve removed it after I really tried to use it for an hour or so.

But the idea of changing a well proven interface is still attractive to me, even if there are situations where it is not really useful. I am stil using FAR manager (a text mode Norton Commander Windows clone with a ton of addons) because I find it really easy, intuitive and most of all FAST. No animations, no pictures, no icons, just data at warp speed. I do stuff before a Windows Explorer window even renders completely. Other people might enjoy something else. Remember the Minority Report interface that everybody went “WOW!” about and that forced Tom Cruise to take a lot of breaks because his arms ached? And about the cars, I am no driver, but think about this: the “interface” has not changed since the early 1920 models! Can you really say it is the most effective? I mostly work with displaying data to customers. That means forms and grids. Can I create a model that is more intuitive? Damn well I can! But how would they export my beautiful hypercube or my carddeck into an Excel sheet?

So, in the end, I believe that UI decisions are actually the same with the business decisions. You don’t want something to look cool until it does the job as effectively as possible.